Passing a Better Planet Forward: How Lucidity Is Helping Enterprises Optimize Cloud Storage To Reduce Their Carbon Footprint

In technology, some of the biggest sustainability challenges aren’t visible—they’re hidden in public cloud costs. Just because you cannot see it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or have a dramatic impact.

According to the US Department of Energy, data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023 and are expected to consume approximately 6.7 to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028. 

The report indicates that total data center electricity usage climbed from 58 TWh in 2014 to 176 TWh in 2023 and estimates an increase between 325 to 580 TWh by 2028.

Unlike cloud computing, cloud storage is not auto-resized; hence, enterprises are left with no option but to over-provision their cloud storage, which not only wastes IT budget but also increases demand for physical hardware in data centers that require electricity to power and cool the environment.

Even idle volumes need infrastructure to support them, consuming energy and resources around the clock. 

This hidden inefficiency drives up operational costs and leaves a larger environmental footprint.

Aim For Sustainability You Can Measure

Digital infrastructure (including networks and devices) accounts for around 2.5–3.7% of global emissions – similar to the airline industry.

The environmental benefits of storage optimization are both significant and quantifiable:

• Optimized storage systems can reduce energy consumption by up to 40%, depending on workload and environment.
  
  
• Fewer physical devices are needed over time, reducing demand for raw materials like rare earth metals, which are energy-intensive to mine and process.
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Here's a calculator to give you a rough estimate of how much CO2 unused storage emits.

*Please note: this calculator takes into account energy use per TB of storage, carbon intensity of electricity and a global average of grid cleanliness. It is only meant for illustrative purposes.

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At scale, these changes add up. For large enterprises managing petabytes of cloud data, right-sizing with AutoScaler can reduce hundreds of tons of carbon emissions annually while unlocking millions in cost savings.

Sustainability Is Good For Your Business

As the world comes together to celebrate Earth Day, conversations often center around visible environmental efforts such as reducing plastic use, planting more trees, and cutting back on travel. 

However, there is a lot more enterprises can do to make a difference at scale. 

Let’s be clear: sustainability doesn’t just help the planet. It also helps your bottom line.

Our customers are seeing major business benefits from smarter storage practices:

• Lower cloud bills from reduced storage usage
  
  
• Improved resource utilization across environments
  
  
• Future-proof operations built to scale sustainably
  
  
• Simplified compliance with evolving environmental regulations

Why Storage Optimization Matters Now

At Lucidity, we’re working to make this invisible waste visible – and eliminate it at scale. 

With our automated multi-cloud storage optimization platform, Lucidity helps enterprises optimize their storage utilization, improve performance, reduce unnecessary cloud storage costs, all while also reducing harmful emissions caused by over-provisioned cloud disks. .

It’s a win for your business and our planet.

With storage costs and environmental concerns both rising, organizations need to rethink how they manage digital infrastructure.

It's no longer sustainable to "set and forget" cloud resources. Over-provisioning may feel safe in the short term, but it creates long-term inefficiencies, both financial and environmental.

By shifting to automated, usage-based optimization with Lucidity AutoScaler, teams can move from reactive cleanup to proactive sustainability. You no longer have to choose between reliability and efficiency—you can have both, at scale.

Make a Measurable Difference This Earth Day

At Lucidity, we’re proud to help our enterprises align operational excellence with environmental responsibility. With Lucidity running quietly in the background, your storage footprint gets smaller. Automatically.

This Earth Day, we invite enterprises to take a closer look at what’s hiding in their cloud environments. 

Because sometimes, the biggest opportunities to reduce carbon emissions are the ones you don’t see until you start measuring.

Small changes in how we manage storage can lead to massive improvements in sustainability.

And with the right tools, those changes don’t need to be complex.

Get a free assessment to gain visibility into how you can do your part to meet your business objectives in a sustainable way.